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Enter your Blog
Assuming that you have successfully logged into the Talking Justice community and updated your user profile to include an avatar (signature photo) and biography, you are now ready to enter your first blog. Locate the Blogs link in the Menu bar at the top of the page.

You'll probably bookmark the location of your blog, or we could email a direct link to it, but we'll describe here the way to find it if you don't have the benefit of a predefined bookmark or link.

The following image shows the default Blogs page:


Navigating to Your Blog - Use the Calendar:
If your blog is assigned to a particular day of the month,
you can simply locate your day on the calendar in the right-hand sidebar.

Click the day (in this case, it's Day 10):


Again, you will probably want to bookmark this page, in order to return to it more quickly next time.
Navigating to Your Blog - Drill Down:
If your blog is not assigned to a particular day of the month, you can still locate it by browsing.

From the default Blogs page, just below the calendar in the right-hand sidebar, locate the Blogs group of links.

Click the link that says: Blogs on this Site.  This produces a list of all the blogs in the site:


Scroll to your blog (in the case of our illustration, Veterinary News).  Click the link:


This will load your Blog page:

If it's the first time you have visited, it will look something like the page pictured above: empty.  Our goal is to remedy that condition.

Midway down the page in the right sidebar is a group called Common Tasks. 
The first of these is Write a Blog Post. 

Click it.



Write a Blog Post:
The Blog editor page loads:


Start by entering a Title.  All posts must have a title.


You'll enter the main part of your blog in the Body area.  It has all the familiar editing and formatting tools you're familiar with from word processing programs such as Microsoft Word. 

The following sequence illustrates a few ways of working with it.  You'll doubtless discover others.

First of all, you can simply type your blog directly into the text box:


Formatting Text:
To apply formatting, begin by selecting the text:

Select Font and Size from the drop-downs in the menu bar.  You can also change text color, paragraph alignment, margin indent; all the familiar functions:

Creating Hyperlinks:
To create a link to a web resource, you follow a similar procedure.  Select the text you want the link applied to:

Then, click the Insert Hyperlink button:

The Link Properties dialog opens. 

Enter the URL of the web page you want to link to:

Note that the URL must include the protocol "http://" in order to work properly (see callout above).

There are lots of other controls in this dialog box.  All of them are of no interest to us.  Click OK to continue.

Testing your Hyperlink:

When you have entered a hyperlink in the Body editor, it will appear in a different color, but it is not yet active. 

While in Normal editing mode, you can't check the links. 




To test the link, click the Preview button at the bottom of the editor (see at left). 

The editor is replaced by a preview of your post and the link becomes active:


Blogging from Microsoft Word

Most writers use a program like Microsoft Word to write.  Most of them use Microsoft Word.  Most people who have done web development have suffered enormously from the ways the Microsoft Word's formatting, typically, fails to translate successfully to the web.

Now that you're a blogger, you'll be the one who has to deal with this unpleasant fact.  Fortunately, the Talking Justice blog editor includes a fairly capable Word translator.  It offers two solutions and we'll show both of them here.

Start by opening the Word document you want to post. 

Select the text and copy it:


Click the icon with the little Microsoft Word logo on it:


A requester appears asking: Do you want to clean the code before pasting from Word?  First let's try saying 'no.'  Click Cancel:


This pastes the Word material into the post's Body block, converting the Word formatting as best as it can.  Often, it is more than 90% successful:


Sometimes, however, the Word formatting doesn't translate successfully.  If you try it the Cancel way and you get unsatisfactory results, delete everything from the Body text box and try again.  This time, when asked to clean the code, click OK:


This strips out any formatting that's ambiguous or downright un-web friendly.  Simple formatting (like bold, size changes, etc.) will be preserved. 

Remember, if you choose this method, you'll have additional formatting to do:


Keywording with Tags:
The Tags text field provides a means of entering keywords that make your blog post searchable across blogs and throughout the Talking Justice site (and also enhance its relevance when offsite bloggers may index your posts on their sites).  Enter general (e.g.: affirmative action) and specific (e.g.: Brown v. Board) as search terms, separated by semicolons: (e.g.: school desegregation; Brown v. Board; Little Rock, Arkansas; civil rights):

As with other elements of the editor, there are many more controls that we're not interested in.  You can leave the Excerpt text box blank.  We require that you leave the Name field blank. 

Publishing the Blog
Post Date always defaults to "now."  You might wish to backdate the post (to correct for an incorrect time zone, for instance).  If you set the Post Date forward, your post won't appear until the date and time specified.  This provides a means for you to embargo your post until the specific date and time of your choosing.

Leave all the radio button controls in their default conditions (i.e.: don't change them).

Then, click the Publish button.


You're returned to the Dashboard, in a view that displays a list of posts for your Blog:


You can preview your blog post by clicking the View button.




You can delete any blog post by clicking the Delete button.  There will be one confirmation request: If you click Cancel, the post will not be deleted; if you click OK, the post will be deleted.  Once deleted, the post cannot be recovered, so make sure that deleting is what you really want to do.


You can revisit your post for further editing by clicking its title.  There's no limit on the number of times you can edit your post, or any time limit.  You could return to a post after 6 months and make changes, or add new material.


When done with adding and editing blog posts, click the Exit Control Panel and Return to Site link at the upper right corner of the page.


Managing your Blog - the Dashboard
We have seen the blog management Dashboard as the destination where clicking Publish leaves you.  This section will illustrate how to get back to the same view any time you wish.

Here we see a typical view from the Blogs main page:


You can either click on the title of one of your own blog posts:

or, if your blog is assigned to a day of the month, click its day in the calendar.

Or return to your blog page using a shortcut or bookmark.
Whichever way you get there, once you are on your blog page
(and are properly logged in), you will again see the
Common Tasks links in the right-hand sidebar. 

Click My Blog Dashboard.

This opens the dashboard, but in a different view than we are used to:

This view is useful, as it will report the number of blog posts, number of comments received, etc.  Let's look at the navigational menu at the left:

The default view of the Dashboard is of Common Tasks.  These include:
Write a Blog Post
 The blog post editor should now be familiar to you.
Create a New Page
 (Blog posts can be paged.  We encourage relative brevity,
so won't discuss paging further.)
Review Comments
 Provides an easy way to review and manage comments to all
your blog posts.


When you click the next menu item, Manage Content, the Common Tasks menu will collapse and the Manage Content menu will expand:



For the time being, we will note only that by clicking the All Posts menu item, you will be returned to the Posts list:


We leave it to you to explore the functionality of the remainder of the Manage Content menu. 

We ask that you do not experiment with items under the Global Settings menu, as these may produce unwanted effects in other blogs.


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